This post started out as a bump for another great Boston Globe Big Picture Blog post, this time on the 2010 Asian Games opening ceremony in Guangzhou. The deeper I dug into this opening ceremony, the more my mind was blown. Imagine a huge performance stage covered with differing depths of water, and thous…

Nah, don’t imagine it. Just check out these pictures and video. This thing is amazing.

How much does something like this cost? I asked myself the same question. From Wikipedia:

Several statements were made prior to the official statement about the cost. On March 11, 2005, Lin Shusen of the Guangzhou Municipal Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) said the Games “will not cost more than ￥2 billion”, in stark contrast to an earlier report, which had claimed that the cost could exceed ￥200 billion.

In March 2009, the director of the marketing department of the Games, Fang Da’er, claimed that the Games were short of funds, due to lack of sponsorship and the global financial crisis. An informal estimate put the Games’ expenditure at about US$420 million and revenue at US$450 million.

On October 13, 2010, Mayor of Guangzhou Wan Qingliang officially revealed in a press conference that the total cost of staging the Asian Games and Asian Para Games is about ￥122.6 billion ($17 billion), with ￥109 billion spent on infrastructure, ￥6.3 billion on the venues and some ￥7.3 billion spent on Games’ operation.